China is on track to rival the US as a nuclear power by the early to mid-2030s. More than only high-yield nuclear missiles to use as strategic weapons to deter a nuclear attack against it, the People’s Liberation Army is developing a variety of tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield as part of a tripartite nuclear force structure consisting of land, sea and air-based nukes that can be launched from numerous platforms.
This is way beyond what China needs to deter another power contemplating the use of a weapon of mass destruction against it. Thankfully, there is little evidence that the Chinese Communist Party believes it can or is preparing to win a nuclear exchange.
Why then the interest since 2019 in becoming a nuclear superpower? Moreover, why is China building up these forces in a deliberately opaque manner, from positioning conventional and nuclear weapons together to a refusal to explain its nuclear doctrine despite insisting that it has a “no first use” policy? And what is the intended effect of China’s growing nuclear arsenal on allies such as Australia?
Wars are won and lost in the mind
The CCP and People’s Liberation Army take political or psychological warfare as seriously as the kinetic kind. There are several components when it comes to the way the PLA executes psychological warfare against the US and its allies related to its growing interest in nuclear weapons. The intent is to degrade an adversary’s decision-making, weaken the adversary’s will to fight, undermine an adversary’s support for war, undermine the resolve of an adversary government from within and to enhance Chinese deterrence of potential foes. Nuclear weapons are seen as an increasingly important strategic asset to impose China’s will on potential adversaries. But not with the blustery approach we have seen from Russia’s Vladimir Putin or the former Soviet Union
These are the three ways China is using nuclear weapons to change the psychological environment with creates real strategic and tangible effects. The first concerns strategic narratives. This sounds vague, but stay with it because the Chinese take it extremely seriously.
The Chinese intent is not merely to disrupt, confuse or create mischief but to craft and control grand narratives. Doing so is extremely effective because these narratives determine how we interpret information and situations, what seems doable, what seems prudent rather than reckless, and what appears to be rational and in one’s long-term interest. Distilled to their most essential form, these grand narratives are:
- Chinese dominance is the historical norm and is inevitable.
- The objectives of the CCP are permanent and unchanging.
- The CCP and PLA are fundamentally undeterrable and prepared to pay any price to achieve an expanding list of core objectives.
- The US is an increasingly weak, unpredictable and unreliable ally.
Consider the Taiwan issue. The CCP is relentless in trying to persuade the world that integrating Taiwan into the mainland is a permanent and unchanging core objective for the CCP, that the PLA will be instructed to expend all efforts to prevent Taiwanese independence (and forcibly take Taiwan if necessary), that US resolve to defend Taiwan cannot be as firm as China’s – with the implication that it is foolhardy for allies such as Australia to be involved in any Taiwan Strait conflict.
This is the spellbinding power of Chinese strategic narratives enhanced by its nuclear modernisation program. Even if one assesses that the conventional military balance in northeast Asia between the US and China is equal, many argue the Chinese resolve and ability to bear the risks and costs of a major war over Taiwan exceed that of the US.
Their argument goes like this. The US may be able to inflict significant damage on Chinese forces but this will not be sufficient to be prohibitive. Over an issue such as Taiwan, the CCP is prepared to pay any price to achieve victory. This could include the threat of or actual launching of a strategic nuclear weapon or a tactical one in the field of battle. In any dangerous game of nuclear threat and bluff between the US and China, it is therefore taken for granted that China has the ascendancy.
While China is assumed to be able and willing to inflict prohibitive costs on the US, at no point is it considered that the US can do the same without suffering prohibitive costs of its own. If accepted, the only plausible and sensible policy response is for the US and its allies to avoid a war over Taiwan under any circumstances. If this reasoning is accurate, it raises the question of why China has not already used force against Taiwan. Regardless, from here it is a small and logical step to make the further argument that US allies such as Australia ought to disavow any efforts to join the US in collective brinkmanship against China, let alone contemplate any role for Australian forces in a Taiwan conflict.
The corollary is that unable to make any significant military contribution, Australia should completely sit out a US-China war. Not surprisingly, China also actively encourages such logic and argumentation in countries such as Japan and The Philippines.
Escalation and coercion
The second intended strategic effect of Chinese nukes goes to deterrence, escalation and coercion of allies. China is seeking to control and manipulate the objective and subjective risk calculations of the US and allies. Becoming a nuclear superpower helps greatly. Indeed, we argue that the rationale behind China’s nuclear modernisation is very much about coercion to achieve political and strategic objectives rather than as weapons to use against a nuclear-armed US.
The PLA’s practice of entangling conventional and nuclear capabilities, investment in dual-capability missiles, refusal to agree to any treaties related to its nuclear weapons program and general lack of transparency when it comes to Chinese nuclear doctrine and tactics is deliberately designed to confuse, coerce and intimidate without making such threats explicit.
The lack of clarity about strategic and tactical reasons for Chinese nuclear modernisation is effective when combined with the broader range of Chinese psychological warfare activities.
For example, in response to a visit to Taiwan in August 2022 by Nancy Pelosi, the US House of Representatives Speaker at the time, China fired several nuclear-capable missiles into Taiwanese waters. This show of possible intent in the event of an escalating Taiwan crisis is ominous because China already deploys hundreds of tactical nuclear-capable missiles in the region while the US does not.
Without needing to formally abandon its “no first use” nuclear policy, Beijing enhances its deterrent of other nations and capacity to coerce.
It works. For example, president Joe Biden delayed the long-planned test of the US’s nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing during China’s show of force near Taiwan. In April 2022, Biden similarly cancelled a test of this same missile in a bid to lower nuclear tensions with Russia during the war in Ukraine.
Beijing would have observed the US reticence to authorize Ukraine to strike Russian-based military assets using US and other Western weapons for fear of escalating matters with nuclear-armed Russia.
It is China’s method of controlling and dominating the psychology of regional escalation dynamics. As the PLA’s 2013 Science of Military Strategy puts it in the context of a nuclear strategic deterrent, the adversary’s “train of thought” must be controlled and manipulated.
Undermining extended nuclear deterrence
The third strategic effect concerns US extended nuclear deterrence; that is, the US deterring China from using a nuke against an ally by threatening to retaliate with a WMD on behalf of that ally.
If countries such as Australia are not assured that they are covered by extended deterrence, they are less likely to allow more significant US military assets on their territory, less likely to strengthen deterrence by investing significantly in their own militaries and less likely to join the US in a future conflict against China.
There is much for China to work with when it comes to weakening the credibility of US extended nuclear deterrence.
First, the Chinese willingness to escalate seemingly exceeds that of our side. We see this in China’s activities in the Taiwan Strait and East and South China seas, and the PLA’s rapid conventional and nuclear build-up that is inherently escalatory.
Demonstrating credibility required for deterrence (and assurance of allies) needs constant signalling to allies and adversaries. While China continually escalates in many contexts, the US traditionally has shown an extreme reluctance to impose costs on China – even for the sake of deterrence. Think about psychology and the message to the region: if the US does not have the resolve to escalate and impose costs when relatively little is at stake, what confidence will allies have that the US will somehow gather the resolve to impose costs on China in more extreme scenarios – with nuclear retaliation being the most extreme scenario?
Moreover, extended nuclear deterrence is at its most credible if retaliation against China leads to certainty of extreme and disproportionate devastation to China. However, China’s rapidly growing nuclear and conventional capabilities have not been accompanied by US efforts to defend its previous pre-eminence.
Win without fighting
One of the most famous lines from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” The key is the passage that follows as it gives the famous line strategic context and content: “The highest realisation of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities.”
China is using its growing nuclear weapons arsenal to alter the thinking and risk calculations of the US and, more pointedly, its allies. Without willing and courageous allies, the geographically distant power of the US cannot sustain and assert its power in Asia. The Chinese aim is to constrain, deter, coerce, compel and subdue Australia and other regional states in peacetime. This is how China wins without fighting.